While Microsoft's Security Essentials has been very well received because of its small footprint and unobtrusive nature, it didn't always rank among the very top when it came to its detection rates. Overall, I'd still say it's one of the best antivirus tools. Now, with version 2.0, Microsoft has improved the detection mechanisms, but of course, it'll take some tests before we can see how effective they are.

Unless you have PIII or earlier, it makes ZERO sense to run XP for hardware reasons. Windows 7 makes MUCH better use of modern hardware features like the video card and multicore processors, while also being about a million times more secure. It's also a lot more stable.

Even back when XP was all that Microsoft had to offer I already found it a steaming pile of crap - with 7 out the door, the stench has only gotten worse.

I haven't noticed much difference in stability; maybe I'm lucky, but XP wasn't all that bad. I guess I hesitate to make that comparison even, since I ran (and still run) XP on a much larger number and variety of machines than I run W7 on.

To each his/her own, though. I don't like the dumbed-down GUI in W7 that takes more mouse clicks to find many things than it did in XP; I don't like that my wifi doesn't reconnect coming out of suspend about 70% of the time (could be a driver issue, but Linux doesn't suffer from the problem; I don't have XP on the W7 machine to compare). And W7 is bigger, a bloat which for single- or limited-purpose VMs, does not make sense to carry.

As for security, I ran my XP in limited-user mode, without AV, for a couple years with no problems. I had non-computer-savvy friends run it in LU mode (with AV) also for long periods with no problems. And Stuxnet et al showed that W7 isn't immune to threats. I'm not saying that W7 isn't more secure than XP, but *for me* the difference isn't noticeable, and does not outweigh the extra weight in some of the scenarios I run Windows in.

I will say that the wireless network connects on both my wife's Dell Inspiron 1525 and my HP Pavilion coming out of both sleep and hibernation without any issues. I would definitely look at a possible driver issue.